In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon.
Razors include:
Occam's razor: When faced with competing hypotheses, select the one that makes the fewest assumptions. Do not multiply entities without necessity.
Grice's razor: As a principle of parsimony, conversational implications are to be preferred over semantic context for linguistic explanations.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hume's razor: "If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect."
Hitchens's razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
Alder's razor: If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation then it is not worthy of debate.
Popper's falsifiability principle: For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.
